About Me

An Englishman from London, I've spent more than half my life now in the Philippines, with two grown-up daughters and a wife of more than 30 years to prove it. I run an export business making eco-friendly animals of vegetable fiber, a play reading group, and appear in plays and films when I can. I have long felt western civilization needs to turn over a new leaf, but I see now that we all do.

Friday, December 27, 2013

Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias (1818)
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Horace Smith's Ozymandias (1818) written in friendly competition with the above -
IN Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
"The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Note: Ozymandias is part of the throne name of Rameses II, the Egyptian king of c1350 BCE. A huge fragment of a granite statue carved in his honor, acquired for the British Museum in 1816, must have been the inspiration for these two poems, for the inscription on the base translates as

King of Kings am I, Ozymandias. If anyone should like to know my grandeur and reach of stature, let him surpass any of my achievements.

Woody Allen should take heart from this. In both his Stardust Memories and To Rome with Love he refers to "Ozymandias melancholia", defining this as the realisation that all one's art will be forgotten. On the contrary, these two poems remind us that art far outlives the other human vanities in whose praise it is so often exercised.

Saturday, August 31, 2013

In a performance linked here, of which an animated version was sent to me provocatively by a couple
of minchievous friends, Tim Minchin argues entertainingly that reality is
evidence-based. By evidence I take him to mean that which exists independently
of ourselves and our opinions, and whose objective existence can be verified;
something which all right-minded people accept, but which is carelessly ignored
by deluded Creationists, pseudo-scientific astrologers, predatory faith
healers, sloppy thinkers like the character Storm in the narrative… and of
course me. Minchin makes his case engagingly, with a clever, salty, rhyming monologue,
a domestic setting, and (most importantly) an enthusiastic audience. Here it is.

Persuasive?
Undoubtedly. Objective? Surely
not! My friends, Mr. Minchin’s argument,
or at least his art, has no clothes! He is the unabashed refutation of
everything he so cleverly professes to believe. Not to be labeled an airhead
like Storm, I must now attempt to refute him, and it's with the art of
persuasion - which Minchin employs so well - that I must begin.

And let’s start at the very beginning. The ancient Greeks,
you will recall, had a word for this art - rhetoric - and there was a
then-popular school of philosophy, the Sophists, who practiced it. Socrates
seems to have really had it in for these guys, managing to give sophistry a bad
name that's stuck to it ever since. Plato has him arguing that the art of
persuasion is hollow, concerned with form rather than substance, the province
of the confidence trickster and the charlatan, whose wily way with words
could convince even the erudite back then that black was white – surely the
very antithesis of truth.

That the Sophists got away with
their sophistry, we may now say, was because there was as yet no discipline of
science, no methodology to categorically tell you what was what. Myth had the
weight of fact, and the world was essentially magical. Protagoras consequently
was having little difficulty persuading his listeners that Man was "the
measure of all things". Of underlying structure nothing was known. All was
surface appeal. In such a world slick talk could get you far, and just as
people today will pay handsomely for a good scientific education, so people
back then paid big bucks to the likes of Protagoras and Gorgias to teach them
the art of persuasion. Someone clearly had to put his foot down.

Enter Plato and a nascent science - the looming certainty of
an objective world, in which up would henceforth be up, and down down; the
world of mass, energy, and velocity; a world not of whatever you want, but of
hard facts, in stark and unyielding opposition to mushy, passionate, willful,
insubordinate you. You would henceforth be, like the fallen Adam and Eve,
separate from Creation - a viewpoint from which it could all be measured, to be
sure, but the measuring of which put you - the fickle and unmeasurable measurer
- permanently in your place, subordinate to the real world you measured. As
Minchin disingenuously puts it, "I am a tiny, insignificant, ignorant bit
of carbon." Minchin? As if!

But let’s stick with the Sophists just
a bit longer. In Plato’s Phaedrus Socrates places them eighth in
a social hierarchy of nine; one rung above the hated tyrants. Elsewhere he
calls rhetoric a “knack”, a trick, and not an art at all. Now the Greek word
for art was techne – from which we
get our technology. Technology is the
application of scientific knowledge to practical ends. The operation of science
in the real world was, at least to the Greeks, an art. To put science on a firm footing the art of the Sophists had
to be excised from our collective consciousness. Minchin may trumpet the positive results of
that appalling lobotomy, but the negative repercussions of the resulting
philosophy – that of pure objectivity, with nothing to balance it - are coming
back to bite us.

Sophism hadn't always been in such bad
graces. On the contrary, it had begun promisingly enough with the concept of arete.
Arete is usually translated as
virtue, but this wimpy word mostly reflects the decline of the Sophists’
popularity in the age of Plato. A far better translation is excellence. The
Sophists were originally in pursuit of all-round excellence: the man who could
write and recite poetry, tell a good tale, excel in sports, display skill in
horsemanship and exhibit prowess and bravery in battle. Rhetoric was a part of
that discipline, all of which flowed naturally from a life far from superficial
and false, but rather one that was by the standards of those days true,
a life livedfrom the heart, the source of all that was Good, which, in
pre-Socratic Greece, was the source of everything.

Socrates, according to Plato, turned
all that on its head. He called reason, truth and knowledge objective realities, placing them above
mere senses, appearance, and opinion, which he considered relative truths. That
hierarchy is with us still. Today the only context in which we hear the word
rhetoric is in association with the pejorative epithet empty. Rhetoric -
thanks to Socrates and, especially, that obsessive classifier, Aristotle - is
still associated with baseless passion and bombast, the kind of shallow
persuasion that appeals to the ignorant, stirring the emotions, but lacking substance;
with a thick coating of surface appeal, but void of underlying structure: empty
rhetoric.

Minchin’s Storm narrative, however, is blatantly rhetorical. What, therefore,
one has to ask, is rhetoric still doing in our enlightened age? You may point
out that this is art, and so he’s free to say what he likes – to entertain us
is enough. But surely this would be to capitulate to the Platonic objection
that art is mere decoration, and rhetoric a cheap trick to dress nonsense up as
knowledge. Minchin’s isn’t a circus act,
or art for art’s sake. He’s defending “reality” against a felt threat: the re-encroachment
of wishy-washy subjectivity. This is art in the service of its Platonic master,
materialist science.

Is the long-discredited, non-art of
rhetoric then justified if used in support of truth, of the “facts”? Is there after
all good rhetoric as well as bad? Is this, if you like, a case of “He’s a son
of a bitch, but he’s our son of a
bitch”? This, as it turns out, is exactly
correct, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

There is a difference, let us admit,
between intellectual and pre-intellectual ignorance. While the former might be called a lack of
familiarity with the facts (whatever they may be), the latter fails altogether
to acknowledge the validity of what contradicts its will. This, however, turns out to be more a
quantitative than a qualitative difference; willful ignorance and encyclopedic
knowledge are on a sliding scale, and the latter can be as blind as the former
when its cherished beliefs are threatened.

“Science” says Minchin “adjusts its
views based on what’s observed.” Though true, this needs qualification. What
scientists observe is conditioned by what scientists already believe. What we
see is already driven by our predisposition to see it. There is an infinite
amount of evidence available on every issue. We select what we look at based on
our interest. We ignore whatever at
present lacks value to us. The mere accumulation of raw data is in itself
meaningless. Supposed scientific neutrality will not yield interpretation. On
the contrary, neutrality leaves things as they are. It does not select. It does
not take sides. The truly disinterested observer, if such a person existed,
would make no sense of anything.

“Faith denies observation to
preserve belief,” he continues. That
science doesn’t also involve faith is a highly contentious issue, but here
goes: to the extent that it’s based on assumptions it, too, is base on faith.
The laws of physics are supposedly the bedrock of reality, yet no testable
theory has yet been devised to explain them, and the subject is therefore,
predictably, off-limits. The speed of light has been accepted as an immutable
law, yet for years now it has been observed to change. However, scientists
routinely and often deliberately ignore observed results such as this when they
spoil the elegance of their own previously existing theories: when plotting a
curve through data points any irregularity in the data points is judged random
variation and ignored. Different beliefs
– whether scientific or otherwise – lead to a different selection of facts.
When it’s our own selection we call it objective; when it’s the other guy, we
call it cherry-picking.

So what’s going on here? Rhetoric is
alive and well, because it remains the essential signpost of shared feeling pointing
us in the direction of the accepted truth, in the present case bolstering our common
sense by dignifying it with the popular label “objectivity”. Without persuasion
we would be collectively rudderless, each wandering off on his own, unique course,
unable to communicate with anyone else. Facts (what’s observed) do not speak
for themselves. They are - always - what we make of them. Left to our
own devices different people, scientists included, would make (note that
word) different sense out of the data of experience. The result would be a
veritable Tower of Babel.

What Minchin calls self-evident and
objective is a level of shared belief of sufficient duration that we no longer
question it. ('Duration', 'durability', and 'endure' all come from the
Indo-European root dru, from which we also get the word true. The truth is such not because it’s
objective, but because in our experience it lasts, or – in the case of science
and technology - works.)

In Minchin’s Storm argument what do we know
– absolutely, irrefutably, objectively – that mere opinion holders don’t? He
disses Storm’s contention that knowledge is mere opinion by suggesting that she
try exiting her 2nd floor apartment through the window. Even she, we
instantly recognize, will hesitate, and we in turn leap readily to the conclusion
that this proves the objectivity of knowledge. But we can equally argue that it
remains Storm’s opinion that it would
be foolhardy to leap from her second floor window. She did not need to pass O-level Physics to
appreciate this! And nor, for that
matter, did we. Why are fifty or even a thousand consenting opinions more
objective than one? They aren’t. They
just make their agreed “object” seem more likely.
The strength of the argument is in the numbers.We are powerfully persuaded by virtue of our participation in a
group consensus. This is itself not objective evidence, but it’s the best thing
we’ve got, and, mostly, it does the job.

Minchin uses another rhetorical device:
while his own ridicule passes unchallenged and even approved of, he has Storm,
the outsider, the minority, rashly denigrate the value of knowledge by saying
that it’s “merely” opinion. He then
contrasts “mere” opinion with what the majority believes, and of course garners
a roar of righteous indignation from the crowd against this presumptuous
airhead. How dare she belittle general knowledge? Our outrage is an expression
of majority beliefs sincerely held, but whether and to what degree these
correspond to an objective reality is literally anyone’s guess. That part we have always to take on trust. What we believe, whether based on hearsay or
experience, is still opinion, despite our numerical and moral superiority, because
no matter how confidently we posit the existence of an external Truth
corresponding to our collective beliefs, it can only be corroborated through the
same collective agreement, and in no other way.

People fall down; they walk into
walls. After the painful fact they conjure up theories – about hardness,
density, gravity, etc - that systematize these experiences. Other people test
these theories and pronounce them workable, or not. Schools are created,
to pass on this received collective wisdom. Later, institutions have to be
built to deal with the increasing complexity of these created systems, which
coalesce and interlock into larger and larger entities. Experts are now
required, not just to understand them, but to tell people what to believe. Enter the world of authority: “The real world is far too
complicated for the man in the street to comprehend.” In the minefield of
moral strictures that in the past came to bind a subject-directed world, that
authority was religion, organized under a single, unquestioned leader (whether
Emperor, Pope, or Mohammed). Today, in the flatland of objectivity that Minchin
avowedly worships, it’s science, nominally organized by a bureaucracy, and the
bigger the better.

And then of course there’s Minchin’s command of language. Gorgias (a Sophist contemporary of
Protagoras) paid particular attention to the sounds of words, which, like
poetry, could captivate an audience. He, in opposition to Plato, called rhetoric
the king of all the sciences(!) and his legendary powers of persuasion had an
almost preternatural effect on his listeners. He was apparently capable (rather
like Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony), of persuading them to any course of action. Similarly,
and despite our far greater sophistication, we marvel at Minchin's virtuosity.
His retentive mind enables him to make a wider array of mental connections than
we, his admiring audience, are probably capable of. We therefore feel
privileged to swim in this generous verbal pond. He has created a reality
we're inadequate to challenge. We are, in a word, mesmerized.

Thus is established his authority; a sturdy platform from which – not unlike,
say, the late Christopher Hitchens - he can fire almost at will. The stage,
lighting, and seating in the auditorium are physical enhancements of that
authority, his audiences rendered more willing, more eager participants
thereby. The stage is set! We swallow his
words as audiences two and a half millennia ago swallowed those of Gorgias; as
did even the followers of Jim Jones. We happily
follow this Pied Piper down the path he creates, as we willingly make the same
connections. It's a joyride of collective affirmation.

We trust our authorities because we
count them more knowledgeable than ourselves, and because they are on our side.
That is our dual faith. If they were fallible, or not on our side, how would we
know? “Trust, but verify” was a catchy
slogan of George H. W. Bush, but trust is by definition where the buck stops,
as far as our quest for truth is concerned.
Beyond a certain point in any investigation we deem it unnecessary, or
impossible to go. At that point, we say, the truth is “self evident”. What we may mean by this is that we have
reached the landmined border of our belief system. Beyond that perimeter we
dare not step, for fear of the moral damage our beliefs might then suffer.

Speaking of flatland, what if
Minchin and the majority had agreed that the world was flat, but Storm believed
otherwise? How would the lonely Storm have
fared then? I think we can predict with some certainty that the result would be
exactly the same – “Why don’t you try walking off the edge of the Earth,
Storm?!” followed by general derision, followed by ostracism, followed by Storm
again treated like the Mad Hatter, and confined metaphorically to a tea cup. From
the superiority of our current experience we confidently label those
flatlanders ignorant, but they were pointing to what was then irrefutable fact,
just as we are today.

But surely real science works
differently; for one thing more methodically. The results prove it. Back at the start Socratic dialogue introduced
critique, the precursor of the scientific peer review. Dialogue put “mere” opinion
to the test of logic:

Protagoras:
Truth is relative. It is only a matter of opinion.

Socrates: You mean that truth is mere subjective opinion?

Protagoras: Exactly. What is true for you is true for you, and what is
true for me, is true for me. Truth is subjective.

Socrates: Do you really mean that? That my opinion is true by virtue of
its being my opinion?

Protagoras: Indeed I do.

Socrates: My opinion is: Truth is absolute, not opinion, and that you,
Mr. Protagoras, are absolutely in error. Since this is my opinion, then you
must grant that it is true according to your philosophy.

Protagoras: You are quite correct, Socrates.

One
in the eye for the Sophists? Minchin and my minchievous friends might like to
think so, but what Socrates has exposed here is not actually a falsehood, but a
paradox. The position of Socrates, that truth is independent of all observers, remains
true for Socrates; and the position of Protagoras, that each viewpoint makes
truth relative to the observer, remains true for Protagoras. The latter does
not grant that the former is absolutely correct, only that he is
"quite", i.e. relatively, correct. The two views therefore remain
opposed to each other, with neither logically able to claim ascendancy. Dialogue
alone is insufficient to establish truth in the face of persistent disagreement
between the two parties concerned over their interpretation of the evidence.

How do they break this deadlock? Naturally, they must call
in a third party - the tie-breaker in all questions from the selection
of the next Nobel Prize winner to the existence of the Higgs boson; from 9/11
to global warming. Whichever side the third party now takes will gain the upper
hand. If there are more voters and the vote is deadlocked then the question
(whatever it is) will remain open - one of those unsolved conundrums that keep
academics in gainful employment. If, however, a clear preponderance of voters
can be persuaded - by appeals to experience, or authority, or common sense,
or money, or prestige, or
patriotism, or duty, or self-preservation(not, however, to the bare facts,
for it is their interpretation that is at issue) - to take one
side then the question will be considered largely "solved". The
minority will be ridiculed as fringe crackpots who stick stubbornly to outmoded
ideas. With ridicule will come opprobrium. Their research funding will be
reduced, then, if they remain unrepentant, stopped. No longer bringing credit
to the institution they represent, their peers, concerned for their own
reputations, will now be reluctant to review their work. Unpublishable, they
will remain unhired, and sink into academic oblivion. In precisely this fashion
is the accumulating, onward flow of knowledge perpetuated. And it works! It just isn’t objective.

This familiar chain of events brings unwanted attention to another
Sophist contention: might is right. Again, the materialists are
outraged at this heresy, and again the outcome of the debate is a paradox: the
majority loudly protests that might is not right, it’s “truth” that has
prevailed, while of course the downtrodden minority insists (though not quite
so audibly) that it is, and it hasn’t!

Socrates showed not that the
Sophists were particularly stupid (he admitted at his trial that his dialogues
made everyone uncomfortable), but that we are all caught by thought
itself in an endless series of such paradoxes: absolute versus relative truth,
free will versus determinism, value vs objectivity, mind vs matter, waves
vs particles. The Platonists saw paradox
as a proof of sophist falsehood. Today it
remains anathema to materialist science, though familiar to quantum physics - an
inescapable outcome of the thinking process; a process necessitating the
positing of an external world independent from the thinker, a process itself
called into being largely in response to the limitations and consequent
excesses of its more ancient antithesis, sophism. By switching the focus of
attention from the subject to the object Platonic philosophy merely exchanged
one problem – the fantasy world of untrammelled ego - for another - the
unbridled expansion of logic into the illogical.

But the ego is still with us, pulling
the strings, though hidden now behind a curtain of rational denial. Minchin points out that -

“Alternative
medicine that’s been proved to work is called medicine.”

and

“Every
mystery ever solved turned out to be not magic.”

I think Arthur Schopenhauer said it
best:

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is
ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being
self-evident.

At the ridiculous phase no-one can
yet tell what will become fact. Please think
about that a moment. It often takes an
outsider to point mankind in a new direction, and that’s where every true discovery
takes us. The mainstream has dug itself
a deep channel, and a great deal of effort, pain, and sometimes even martyrdom may
be needed to redirect it. Though more subtle in its methods than the
Inquisition, the path of scientific progress has been marked at every turn by the
ridicule and vilification of those of its pioneering practitioners who strayed
too far from the orthodoxy of the Establishment. The victims of the Inquisition knew what they
were up against. We, for the most part,
do not: there is an almost universal belief among scientists whose work is
ignored that, if their colleagues would only look at the evidence, their work
would be vindicated. This belief rests
on precisely the kind of misunderstanding about the nature of truth and the way
it is arrived at that I have been taking about here. Facts do not speak for themselves. Evidence is not like ripe fruit, waiting to
be plucked. Its configuration is dictated
by the predispositions of the person looking at it. If you are not predisposed to see it, you won’t.

Minchin himself asks a question at
the end of his tirade which threatens to undermine his entire argument -

Isn’t this enough? This unfathomable universe?

Now, I feel, we’re getting near the
crux of the matter. If this universe is,
after all, “unfathomable”, what potentials might it not contain? What, in the final analysis, is the
difference between mystery and magic?
The creativity of which Minchin is such an outstanding exponent is
universally acknowledged to come from we know not where. Great ideas just “pop into our heads”. Afterwards we may rationalize their origins,
but at the moment they occur they have the quality of magic.

There is a reason for this that lies
beyond logic. It is that creativity
arises in the mind before the subjects and objects over which the West has
battled for two and a half millennia.
Creativity is to be found neither in the subject, nor in any object. It precedes all thought of subjects and
objects, because it precedes all thought.
We are creative when we forget
ourselves. Minchin at his keyboard, or the
scientist staring intently at or through his instruments , is in a state of
absorbtion. He is not concerned with
himself, and from this may have arisen the misconception that he was in some
sense “being objective”, but he is, more
accurately, simply absent. At the moment of creation neither subject nor
object is anywhere to be found. Both have
coalesced into an indivisible, single thing.
The same occurs in the actor, the swordsman, the tennis champion, the
lover.

The act of creation brings forth the
world of subjects (me) and objects (the world I observe). Within the creative
fountainhead the paradoxes that arose with thought are temporarily laid to
rest. I and my world are seen as identical, and all opposites are reconciled. Inside
is also outside. Impenetrable darkness becomes blinding light. And perhaps Shroedinger’s cat is both alive and dead, and
both tortoise and rabbit win the race.

And Minchin is at one and the same
time an insignificant scrap of carbon, and the center of his admiring universe.
Doubtless tongue-in-cheek, he calls his life “unimportant”. A professed belief in objectivity demands
this of him, because “the center” can only refer to something measurable, like
the center of the Milky Way galaxy. According to this view the Earth is very
insignificant indeed, and Tim Minchin less significant still. But Tim doesn’t really believe this, and nor
does anyone else. My life is important! Every
sentient being operates from that unshakable premise. The Sophists knew it. But Minchin, like Plato, while himself living
by the same precepts of excellence, dangerously denounces the importance of the
individual from the pulpit he has himself built in order to share his unique
views.

Fun-loving, creative tightrope
walker though he is, the gifted Mr. Minchin represents, for me, the tip of a
very large and dangerous iceberg, most of whose deadly mass lies hidden beneath
a placid surface of unexamined assumptions. He scoffs at the “cheap, man-made
myths” of religion, but the myth of objectivity with which he would replace
them is entirely bereft of meaning of any kind. This myth (I’m beginning to
sound like Storm!) is dehumanizing humanity, and denuding the planet. “Don’t blame science,” you say? The wanton and insatiably greedy tampering that
modern technology enables is part-and-parcel of its hidden hubris; pretending
an absence of the ego that continues to drive us forward. The morally unaccountable cleverness of
science has turned our mother Earth into a playground for genetic engineers,
and a mere commodity for multinational corporations. Our Machiavellian masters,
in their age-old quest for absolute power, and with the means now apparently
within their grasp, are working all-out to control our food supply, our
weather, and our minds.

In conclusion, without the
participation of the observer there is nothing to observe. Our universe, far
from being an objective flatland, is entirely moral and arises only in and
through the act of observation - more properly, participation. The
universe of which you are empirically the center is a quality event, forever
unfolding. You are inescapably
the measure (if you prefer, measurer) of all things. But no man is an
island. The agreement essential to social cohesion requires that some
things be one way and not another. Agreeing to disagree merely shelves the
dispute. The very demand for agreement underscores – no, proves - the objective
neutrality of everything; nothing whatever of value can be deduced objectively.
We all see - we all value - the world differently. The causes of global warming,
for example, are not arbitrary, but until we agree what they are they remain in
limbo; in potential, as a quantum
physicist would say. Having agreed, if we later decide they are something else,
what then of the so-called “objective” facts we previously believed? Thy will simply disappear, like the ephemera
they are; as did the “fact” that the Earth was once flat.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

I have chiefly had men's views
confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of
commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of something. They know that there is a
power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so
complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when
they speak in condemnation of it. The New Freedom. Woodrow Wilson, 1913

There are a number of controversial issues - 9/11, and
the existence of extra terrestrials prominent among them – about which all
doubts (to judge from our derisive dismissal of those who disagree with the
official position) have been satisfactorily laid to rest. About 9/11 we have been prompted by our
authorities not to believe “conspiracy theories”. They have explained to us that the hijacking
of the four planes on 9/11 was carried out by 19 Arab Muslim fanatics armed
with box cutters, and that not to believe this reflects the need to find
simple solutions to otherwise incomprehensible acts in a world too complex for
the man in the street to understand. We have been similarly assured that there
is no evidence whatever to support a belief in the existence of extra
terrestrial intelligence; mold on Mars,
maybe, but non-human intelligence; so
far none detected; anywhere. The highest
intelligences in the known universe reside right here on Earth, in the shape of
our politicians and senior decision makers. We bolster these reassuring denials with our own
confident assertion about large conspiracies that “Nothing as big as that could
be hidden!” End of discussion.

I want to take a few moments to examine these two assumptions
– that our authorities are trustworthy, and that large truths cannot be hidden.
They turn out to be intimately related. To do this I’m going to have to quote extensively
from the highest authorities I can find. There’s no point in me trying to
tackle this topic myself – who will believe me? Who but the authorities
themselves have the – well, the authority to convince the public that they can’t
be trusted?

But right away I think you see the problem. If someone in
authority confesses that he is untrustworthy, how can he be telling the truth? His
very position in our society refutes it. Will we not rather tend to admire him
for his candor; or even his modesty? Will we not rather continue to trust our
authorities for the very reason they themselves give: that we cannot afford not to trust them? Implicit in our trust is the prayerful belief, as innocent
as that of a child in the grip of a pedophile, that they must be on our side. Oh no! Don’t
talk to me about checks and balances, the free press! They’re all – those that
matter - bought, blackmailed, intimidated, and compromised. The voices
that can speak out are permitted because they can’t be heard. Safely confined
to “zones of free speech” they can be pointed to as proof that democracy exists. So, we’re in a double bind here, a kind of Catch 22. Those that can
speak truth to power lack the authority to be believed, while those that
have sufficient credibility can for that very reason speak freely of their
treachery, knowing we cannot afford to believe them. And so, I suspect, it has always been.

But anyway, here goes –

We’ll know our disinformation program
is complete when everything the American public believes is false.William
Casey, CIA Director (from first staff meeting, 1981)

Did you get that? You did? The hell you did! If youdid,
nine tenths of this blog needn’t have been written! Go back and read it again…twice!... Ok. On we go –

In most of its operations, the CIA is by definition a
conspiracy, using covert actions and secret plans, many of which are of the
most unsavory kind. What are covert operations if not conspiracies? At the same
time, the CIA is an institution, a structural part of the national security
state. In sum, the agency is an
institutionalized conspiracy. [Emphasis mine - PH] http://www.theprogressivemind.info/?p=22849" The JFK
Assassination II: conspiracy phobia on the left", Michael Parenti,
1996, with commentary at the above link.

And,

Deception is a state of mind, and
the mind of the State. James Angleton, Head of CIA Counter
Intelligence, 1954-75

Is this beginning to
sound a bit Orwellian to you? Don’t worry, you’re in good company:

I never
would have agreed to the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in
forty-sevenif I had known it
would become the American Gestapo.”

That’s
right, Gestapo. And that was President Harry Truman. Still not with the
program? That’s totally understandable,

The individual is handicapped by
coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.J. Edgar Hoover, ex-FBI director (referring
in this case to the conspiracy to create the New World Order).

And of course to
hide every big conspiracy from the trusting public there must be a big lie,
about which -

…there
is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation
are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature
than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their
minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie…. It
would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they
would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so
infamously. Even though the facts which
prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt
and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. [Emphasis mine - PH]

Adolph Hitler , Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X, translated by James
Murphy

If the first assumption – that our authorities are trustworthy – is erroneous, then so, surely, is the second. For it follows, as night follows day, that if you cannot trust your authorities, then in all the matters over which you have given them that authority you are in the dark. To put it another way, if whistle blowers could expose the treachery of our leaders with impunity, there’d very quickly be no treachery left to expose.

But isn’t thatexactly what we believe? Annie Machon, an ex-operative of MI5, Britain’s
equivalent of the FBI, has tried to shake us out of our complacent naivety. She and David Shay, then both MI5
agents, blew the whistle on MI5 and MI6 after uncovering false flag operations
they funded and in which entirely innocent bystanders were killed. "False
flag operations are perfectly normal,” she tells us matter-of-factly, in the
interview (linked here). “This is what intelligence agencies do." The killing of innocent bystanders, however,
was illegal under British law. This in
turn presented David and Annie with a dilemma –

MI5 is supposed to protect national
security… They are a law unto themselves. There is no real oversight in the UK
at all. If you work for the agencies and you witness crime there is nowhere you
can turn to to report that crime apart from the head of the agency... There is
no accountability. ... They are working for the interests of the
Establishment... of which they are a part...

How are we to believe this? If you
are British it flies in the face of much that you have been brought up to hold
dear. So, who is lying here? Is it the British government and its intelligence
community, or is it this lone woman? Annie Machon continues -

The price we paid [as
whistleblowers] was very high. If you work for a corporation you have certain
protections under the law. If you are a whistleblower from MI5 or MI6 you are
the criminal, because there is a piece of law called the Official Secrets Act,
and if you speak to anyone, ever, about your work, then you've broken that.
There is no defense under law. So even if you are reporting murder on the part
of the spies you are the criminal, and not the murderers. It's that simple.

It gets worse. Unable to take their
tale to their superiors in MI5, they tried to break it to the newspapers. In
this way they hoped both to gain some protection from the retribution that was
sure to follow, as well as the publicity necessary if the British Secret
Services were to be brought to heel. In
attempting this Annie and David discovered

The media have become part of the Establishment,
the system. They're no longer part of the Fourth Estate, holding the system to
account.

Moreover -

I-Ops [MI5's Information Operations
department] is designed to deliberately manipulate the media in the UK; where
they plant fake stories, and where they spin stories, and where they massage
stories that they want to control. So there are official mechanisms for
manipulating the mainstream media in the UK... It's something we all need to be
aware of: quite how controlled the media is - by the spies, as well as by the
governments.

In attempting to blow the
whistle on very grave wrongdoing Annie and David put themselves on the wrong side
of the Establishment; that is to say, outside the mainstream, and the realm of
authority within whose closely-guarded borders you and I are comfortably
confined. Their voices therefore cannot be heard where it matters, in the
mainstream press. But since their voices can
be heard where it doesn’t matter,
the illusion of freedom is preserved.

Awakening to the huge
political transformation evolving in the wake of 9/11 an attempt was made
recently by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Dana Priest to map
– literally - the extent of government secrecy in America. In her words “There
was something out there that was not there before 9/11, and it was
growing.” In the trailer(linked here) to the one hour
PBS Frontline expose Top Secret America,
she claims that “close to 500 organizations and 2000 contracting companies” in the
United States are engaged in “top secret work… There are close to a million
people who are living in this different world.” Marcus Brauchli, Executive
Editor of the Washington Post, adds
that there are “17,000 locations,
1,300 government entities, 3,666 private sector entities, 1,200 government
agencies” thus engaged. Perhaps not surprisingly, in
view of the subject matter, the trailer to Top
Secret America promised more than the documentary finally delivered. Said
one disappointed viewer of the latter,

I've waited for this documentary for
well over a year now, and I was STUNNED by what I saw tonight when it finally
aired. It was a complete SNOWJOB. Frontline spent less than 5 minutes talking
about the massive domestic intelligence machine spying on Americans since 2001.
They used old material from previous documentaries on Iraq and Afghanistan as
filler for the other 55 minutes.

Darn it! Foiled again!

In an address at the Drone
Summit in 2012 author and journalist Jeremy Scahill, commenting on the fate of
whistle blowers in the U.S., echoed the words of Annie Machon in the UK -

The application of the Espionage Act -
unprecedented, record-setting - to go after whom? People who blew the whistle
on Bush Era crimes. Those who participated in the warrantless, illegal tapping
of US Citizens can walk around as free citizens - unless they blow the whistle
on it.

Then, you're going to be prosecuted, then they're going to ruin your life.
Then, they're going to knock down your door, and snatch you and threaten you;
take you and try to put you on trial. As John Kyriakou, the former CIA agent
did, if you talk about water-boarding, they will go after you [Kyriakou was sentenced to 30 months
in prison on January 25, 2013].
If you DO the water-boarding, you get to write a book, like Jose Rodriguez, who
destroyed the CIA interrogation tapes and is running around bragging about it -
and we're going to have to see him all over this country while he pimps his
book - and he's on 60 Minutes tomorrow night.

So, we live in an upside down society, where the people that orchestrate these
policies; that are torturing people, that are using robotic warfare to kill
people based on "pattern of life" and not evidence that they've been
involved in any crime or act of terrorism, whatsoever - those people, who are
engaged in these activities, they're going to retire with the pensions. But
those people who blow the whistle on it are going to have to fear for their
liberty, every day that they walk around.

It's chilling what it's done. We already had a totally pliant media culture in
this country - the White house Sycophant Association is having their dinner
tonight. With few exceptions, that's what it is. These White House
Correspondents that sit there, correspond whatever the agenda is, in the White
House and they serve as conveyor belts for the lies and the propaganda of
whoever happens to be up at that podium.

Author and journalist Jeremy
Scahill, speaking at the Drone Summit,
April 28, 2012.

So, what is the American
government so busy working on that it doesn’t want even its own public to find
out? I’ve already talked quite a bit about 9/11,
the most audacious false flag operation in America’s history, of which the
repercussions still continue, but I’ve not yet tackled extra terrestrials. I did
mention them back at the start of this post, so why don’t we take a look at them?

Just this week, as it happens,
a three-day Citizens’ Hearing on Disclosure was conducted in Washington DC on
this very subject. Not a blip in the mainstream media about this, of course –
these guys are all crackpots, after all. Still, if appearances are anything to
go by they’re a great deal saner than, and at least as intelligent as, our
politicians. The purpose of this hearingwas to tear away the cloak of
secrecy which has smothered the UFO phenomenon for the last sixty-five years,
by first compiling massive professional witness testimony (linked below), and
then bringing together live witnesses to testify at the hearingitself – from
which another documentary film is planned to be made and distributed.

I myself have seen a flying
saucer, so I am receptive to their testimony. But, experts and professionals
though they are in their various fields, they do not have the imprimatur of our
authorities, so you may be less inclined to believe them.

Nevertheless the two-part compendium of
testimony linked below, primarily by professional military personnel, is the
most devastating proof of alien contact with our planet – short of actually seeing
ETs yourself - that I have ever come across. Here’s Part 1.As the second part gets under
way the testimony builds… and builds. At approximately minute 40 Dr. Steven M.
Greer gets into the matter of secrecy and – what I have not touched on – compartmentalization, or the principle
of the need to know, which makes such massive secrecy possible. He who is at
the top sees everything. At successively lower tiers of the information pyramid
you are privy to less and less. And then of course there’s the Official Secrets
Act. Here’s Part 2.

After the Citizens Hearing on Disclosure ended I scanned the web for any acknowledgement from the mainstream media,and - wonder of wonders! - there was one mention, by none other than the Washington Post. I had cancelled my subscription to that propaganda outlet several years ago, but I clicked on it, and here it is.

Yes, as far as our mainstream media are concerned, evidence and testimony be damned, it's still crackpots chasing little, green, bug-eyed monsters.William Colbywould be pleased. However, I have seldom, if ever, seen such a unanimous chorus of protest as this carelessly contemptuousreviewer generated in the Comments section. Maybe the tide is turning.

Saturday, April 6, 2013

We’re
all social beings, and ridicule, that repulsive attractor, is what holds us
together whenever we threaten to break ranks, and escape from the herd, or
worse, attempt to lead it in a new direction.
Its use immediately establishes, or reinforces, a hierarchy: it confers superiority on the dispenser by the
assumed right to be rude, and thereby tells the humble recipient what he is
supposed to believe. It is an entirely unscientific, gut-level, socially
acquired and directed behavior, aimed at corralling the uninitiated, or
misguided, into the fold of correct (i.e. group) belief of whatever kind.

In his Full
Comment in the Canadian National Post
a while back1 Jonathan
Kay quoted controversial New Age lecturer David Icke -

We are like droplets of water in an ocean of …
awareness. We are ‘individual’ at one level of perception, but still part of
the infinite whole. More than that, we are the infinite whole, just as a
droplet is the ocean and the ocean is the droplet.

I find myself in considerable accord with this, but
Kay was approaching it from a different perspective. “Icke has written 16
books, and most of them are full of meandering New Age rhapsodies such as this,”
he intoned. The word ‘meandering’ instantly warned me, like a rap over the knuckles, that I was backing the wrong
horse, that my beliefs were incorrect. Absent that pejorative term I might well
have continued heedlessly in my error. Kay continued -

Men such as Icke epitomize what I call the “Cosmic
Voyager” — the hippie earth child of the eight-part typology I have developed
in my research of conspiracy theorists. In broad terms, the Cosmic Voyager
resembles what University of York cult expert Colin Campbell called a “seeker”
— a spiritual omnivore perpetually spiraling out toward the margins of Western
cultural and political life.

Notice how the warning flags marking the borders of heretical
belief continued to litter the reader’s path – ‘hippie earth child’, ‘conspiracy theorists’, ‘cult’ - and alongside them the pointers to correct belief – ‘eight-part typology’, ‘research’, ‘University…
expert’. Without these clues this
would be just another, dry, academic anthropological study. It is not. This is propaganda.

The Cosmic Voyager often will follow eccentric food
regimens, dabble in Eastern religious doctrines and exhibit a pronounced
suspicion of conventional medicine. His conspiracism flows naturally from the
instinctive sense that the world around us is not what it seems; and that we
are all bound together by some kind of unseen natural life force that is being
suppressed or degraded by the guardians of our materialistic society.

Again, but for the ridicule (‘eccentric’, ’ dabble’, ‘conspiracism’,’instinctive’, ‘some kind of’)
I would find this description quite appealing. But Kay's message is clear -
he is saying that because the likes of David Icke espouse beliefs so contrary to
those we all surely must share (on pain of being labeled ridiculous), it stands
to reason that they are borderline insane. Indeed, put like that, the accusation seems
irrefutable, so accustomed are we to still being told – in this supposedly enlightened
age - what we may and may not believe.But what, one is mischievously tempted to ask, is
Kay’s own mythology? What unquestioned and ultimately irrational beliefs drive him, or is his position that of theideal observer-without-a-viewpoint?

Surely what Kay is defending is, loosely, the
viewpoint of the mainstream, which he assumes to be by that very fact
self-evidently sound and reasonable. The Cosmic Voyager’s mythology, on the
other hand, says Kay, is “vague and labile”.

Central to the Cosmic Voyager’s worldview is the
fictional reconstruction of human history.

Really? Why is the Cosmic Voyager’s interpretation
of history so especially ‘fictional’?
Is conventional history in some superior sense more ‘factual’? If so, then presumably all historical revision is in
error. Yes, it is at this point that I
feel my own critical faculties start to react. We are not, apparently, to
question those pieces of received, historical construction (I am not even to
name them) that have been cordoned off from factual examination by the people
whom Kay represents, namely the guardians of our beliefs. Freedom of speech only applies to topics that
won’t rock the big boats. Well, ok, so what else is new? My
God is better than your God, and if you don’t believe in my God, then you are a heretic. We won't burn you at the stake, we'll just ostracize you. Significant in this self-congratulatory circus are
the kinds of followers Kay attracts. They strongly resemble subscribers to the Skeptic Magazine of Michael Shermer, and
the followers of Richard Dawkins (one of whose blogs had to be temporarily closed down, so
vitriolic had become the ridicule piled by his faithful followers on the heads
of non-believers). One of Kay's followers dismisses Icke and his followers as “evangelicals”, with a
contemptuous “They are all equally loonie” (sic),
while another defender of mainstream belief opines that “A worrying number of
people believe in 'energy' and 'vibration' and some sort of
'interconnectedness' between us all”. Interconnectedness? Perish the thought! A third wonders, nostalgically, “what is
'sane' any longer?”Oh, the reassuring blanket of received wisdom! As
these young minds take their first, faltering baby-steps let no-one move the
furniture around!

“Facts”,
Kay would I think say, are immutable, solid, and enduring. They “speak for
themselves”. It is this well-worn article of faith which gives the lowly,
but indispensable scoffer his right to ridicule. Implicit
in this saying is the belief that there is just one right way of seeing things –
our way. There is no room for
interpretation. The real, factual world is ‘out there’, and we see it correctly. Consequently anyone who offers analternative interpretation is wrong, and deserves our ridicule.

The
inherent self-contradiction of this position is lost on the scoffer, because
“contradiction” is not in his vocabulary. Let me briefly explain: childish though it may often seem, ridicule
happens to be socially necessary. This is so because, despite all belief to the
contrary, knowledge is not acquired "objectively". There is nothing intrinsically meaningful in the world of undigested facts. Their meaning is put there by the act of
living. Consequently there is an
infinite number of possible theories to account for the phenomena that
constitute our world. But society
couldn’t survive if everyone was allowed to believe what he wanted. We’d begalloping wildly off in all directions. Communication would be impossible. Groups and societies are defined, precisely, by the beliefs they share2.
Since every phenomenon has an unprovably large number of possible explanations
it is impossible to arrive at the “correct” interpretation rationally without
artificially creating a frame of reference to contain it. The frame of
reference provides the internal consistency that rationality requires. Facts
have no rational explanation independent of the frames of reference we apply to
them. They cannot meaningfully exist
alone, because if all belief is shorn away then – as Gertrude Stein famously
said on her deathbed – “a rose is a rose is a rose”. This is the mystical experience
of isness, as Meister Eckhart called
it, and as David Icke suggests in his books. But the purposelessness of the universe – the
fact that everything is its own
justification – is the last thing our consumer society wants to know about
as it battles, neck craning towards the future, to compete for the world’s
rapidly vanishing resources. Thus arises the need for ridicule, our social
guidepost, to tell us “This way, idiot!
Are you one of us, or not?”

And
right there’s your contradiction. Facts don’t
speak for themselves; they have to be interpreted; to have words put into
their mouths. If language were truly ‘objective’, that is, purged of all
affective signposts, far from becoming self-explanatory, it would lose all
meaning, and the herd – i.e. society
- wouldn’t know which way to turn. ‘Facts’ are not self-evident. The
very need for ridicule proves it, even as it also proves that we are all connected!